Misconceptions about Buddhism Corrected

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Living the Life Series · 12 pages

From Blavatsky Collected Writings XIV pages 432–42, under the heading “A Few More Misconceptions Corrected.” The epigraph states the position: that individual or personal existence is the cause of pains and sorrows, while collective and impersonal life-eternal is full of divine bliss, which neither causes nor effects can darken.

The piece begins by granting what the Orientalists agree on — that the Buddha's foremost aim was to lead human beings to salvation by teaching the greatest purity and virtue, detaching them from an illusory world and from love of the still more illusory physical self — and then turns their own account against them. If the only result of a virtuous life full of privation and suffering is annihilation at the end; if even the supreme perfection that lets an initiate remember the whole series of his past lives and foresee the future ones, through the full development of the inner divine eye, brings him finally to non-being and nothing more — then, she writes, the whole system is idiotic, and Epicureanism is the more philosophical of the two. The argument is thus not that the Orientalists have misread a text but that their reading makes nonsense of the practice it describes. What they are said to be missing is a distinction: between existence in a material or physical state and a purely spiritual existence, spirit or soul-life. Whoever cannot grasp that subtle yet potent difference, the passage concludes, will never appreciate the doctrines at their true value — and the rest of the article works from there.

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